1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to data access and analysis and, more specifically, to a system and method for accessing rich objects via spreadsheets.
2. Description of the Related Art
A spreadsheet application is a data organization tool that allows users to store and organize large amounts of data. In addition, a spreadsheet application allows users to perform various analyses on the data stored in the spreadsheet, including mathematical and statistical analyses. A spreadsheet is typically organized as a series of rows and columns, where a particular intersection of a row and a column is referred to as a cell and holds a unit of data. A common feature of a spreadsheet application is to allow a user to reference a particular cell in an expression that is evaluated to provide a value for a different cell.
Spreadsheet applications are commonly used to manage and analyze financial data. However, raw financial data is typically quite large with many dependencies, and inputting such data into a spreadsheet as well as analyzing such data within a spreadsheet is quite cumbersome and error prone. In addition, some types of raw financial data do not fit well into the row/column organization offered by a spreadsheet and cannot be visualized easily in such an organization. Further still, financial analysis is often quite complex, where an expression typically references multiple cells (often on the order of hundreds of thousands), making the process quite error prone. Since the expressions are often so complex, locating the source of an error is extremely difficult and time consuming.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a mechanism for providing data in a spreadsheet that can be accessed and analyzed in an efficient and less error prone manner.